In Reply to: yes but this wasn't religious wars posted by lydia on September 29, 2003 at 14:30:17:
I'm not so sure about what you're saying. Communism has been around in practice less than 100 years. Christianity has had almost 2 millenia to practice murder, genocide, politicide. Perhaps communism has been able to do so much damage in such a short time is because of purely demographic and technological reasons: there are more people around, packed together more per sq. mile than at any other time in history, and weapons are more effiecient. The trend to target civilians in warfare rose dramatically in the last 2 centuries.
If the destruction caused by communism can be weighed and compared to wars destrcution caused by religion, it's wide open. Why not take in national socialism which can be argued to be compared to communism, and which caused 40 mil deaths in WW II? The Nazis were first sanctioned by the Catholic church as a good thing, to hold back evil communism. Could that be a form of religion?
Then we have a wide assortment, too many to mention, of Christian dictators who felt it was the right thing to do to supress their non-Christian populace. Many of them were puppets who bought into western materialistic values (also arguably a relgion), ideals, cultures and religion. The crimes against humanity by these dictators could be argued to be done in the name of religion at some level.
We'd have to look at the Spanish conquistadors, how many blasthemous populations did they wipe out? Especially when they had gold. Their prisoners were tried and sentenced to execution not in a secular court but by priests.
Then the British, how many heathen did they wipe out? Especially when they refused to cooperate, suddenly they were heathen and had less human rights than Christians.
What about the Crusades, how many did they kill?
What about the wars between the West and East Holy Roman empires?
What about the wars between Protestants and Catholics, which involved several nations in Europe, brought on famine, and disease that wiped out millions?
I'll keep murders and wars in the name of Islam out of it, because I think you're mainly defending Christianity.